Explanation:
THE FAMOUS New York firm of publishers, St Martin's Press,
which had previously published several books by David Irving
and requested him to provide jacket-puffs to promote the
works of their other authors, contracted to publish his
biography Goebbels.
Mastermind of the Third Reich
in April 1996.

SMP came under savage
assault from the Anti-Defamation
League from
February 1996, and their chairman Tom McCormack, who had
visited Irving in London and dined with him over the
previous years, suddenly became A Denier.

SMP dumped the book,
the product of eight years' research, in an unprecedented
action of jibbering, craven, panic.

To the lasting credit
of the American literary world, and the spluttering rage of
the ADL, Vanity
Fairpublished
this article by left-wing British journalist Christopher
Hitchens only a few weeks after the scandalous
ep[isode, backing David Irving to the hilt.

Quick
navigation

Hitler's
Ghost

by Christopher
Hitchens

CHERRY BLOSSOMS are bursting over the
Tidal Basin and the Jefferson Memorial as I ascend the steps
of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. There is to
be a learned seminar today, on the newest interpretation of
the Final Solution. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a
36-year-old assistant professor at Harvard, is to defend
his
thesis in Hitler's Willing
Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, a book
which has been a spring sensation.

Having immersed myself in this volume for a weekend, I am
eager to ask one big question that cries to heaven for an
answer. It is this:

Who on earth does Goldhagen think he is
arguing with?

He comes to tell us there was a good deal of state- and
church-sponsored anti-Semitism in German culture. He adds
that the Nazis made great use of Jew hatred in their
propaganda. He goes on to say that many Germans took part in
beatings, killings, and roundups not because they were
coerced but because they liked the idea. He announces that
not many Germans resisted the persecution of their Jewish
countrymen.

Excuse me, but I knew this and so did you. Moreover, the
sarcastic phrase about "obeying orders" is not even a
well-known explanation, only a well-known excuse. All
the way through Goldhagen's presentation, which is one
tautology piled on another, I wait to make my point. And
then the two big scholars present come to the podium with
their comments, and I realize I have been wasting my
time.

Sophomoric, meretricious, unoriginal, unhistorical, a
product of media hype by Knopf (the book's publisher),
contradictory, repetitive, callow... I'm just giving you the
gist of what they said about Hitler's Willing
Executioners. It must have been quite an ordeal for
Goldhagen, who looks about 12, to sit through this kind of
thing from revered seniors. Professor Yehuda Bauer of
Hebrew University, for example, is effectively the academic
founder of the Yad Vashem Holocaust archives in Jerusalem
and the author of at least three of the dozen or so standard
works on the subject. Professor Konrad Kwiet is no
lightweight, either. He is the scholar-in-residence at the
Research Instituite at the Holocaust Museum and the adviser
to the government of Australia on war crimes.

I watch Goldhagen being ground between these heavy
millstones and two things happen to me. First, I feel a rush
of sympathy for the kid. Sixty-three percent of
German electors voted against Hitler in the last free
election in Weimar, says Bauer witheringly, and there were
vicious Jew-baiters in Germany in the early 19th century. So
how come, Mr. Clever Young Historian, that one time it ends
in blood and another time not? If you don't know, you
shouldn't talk. This big-time book of yours should have
remained a doctoral thesis and maybe those supervisors at
Harvard could try harder. (I'm paraphrasing the scholars
only slightly.)

The second thing that happens is that I feel a new
respect for the Research Institute at the Holocaust museum.
It can't have been easy, this trashing of an attractive and
earnest young man. How was he to know that there is more to
the Holocaust than meditations on cruelty and the German
character, or that he was supposed to have a deep
theoretical knowledge of Fascism? Doesn't almost every
Hollywood and pulp outlet make the Final Solution seem like
a sort of morality tale? Did not The New Republic'sLeon Wieseltier--whose remarks closed this
seminar--once observe mordantly that "there's no business
like Shoah business"? So, good for the institute.

There is, of course, another answer to the question I
never asked. Goldhagen is involved in an argument
with an unseen opponent, and so are all the other experts on
the platform, including Christopher Browning, whose book
Ordinary Men anticipated Goldhagen by four years.

This unseen opponent is David
Irving, a British historian with depraved ideas about
the whole narrative.

Irving does have a rounded and developed theory of
Fascism, which is to say that he has studied it a lot and
it's had a bum rap. He's even been quoted
as calling himself a "mild Fascist" or "a moderate
Fascist"--oxymoronic if true. In the week that I went to the
Holocaust-museum seminar, Irving was hastily dumped by
St. Martin's Press, which had
undertaken to produce his book
on the papers of Hitler's minister of propaganda, Joseph
Goebbels, the choreographer for the Nuremberg style, and
had then, at the very threshold of publication, taken
fright. Book canceled, author disowned, tearful statements
from the top brass about how if only they had known...

Encountering Tom Dunne of St. Martin's that very
week, I told him I was going to criticize him in print, and
he replied, "If you want a title for the article, call it
'Profiles in Prudence.'" A good joke from a good man. But at
whose expense?

I have thought about this a lot and I feel the need to
say, very clearly, that St. Martin's has disgraced the
business of publishing and degraded the practice of debate.
David Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a
great historian of Fascism. But you would never have known
this from the way that the controversy was written up.

David
Irving is not just a Fascist historian. He is also a
great historian of
Fascism.

HITLER'S SPIN ARTIST was the
headline on a typical column, by Frank Rich in the New
York Times, raising the alarm about the mere idea of
Irving's being published. The Washington Post was not
laggard, saying that Irving "routinely refers to the
Holocaust as a hoax." Jonathan Yardley , a cultural
critic of some standing, wrote a whole article that
positively sighed with satisfaction at the idea that, having
neither read nor seen the book, he could now safely counsel
others to do likewise. Nary a voice was raised, in American
publishing or academe or journalism, to ask if David Irving
had anything to contribute as a chronicler.

Things were rather different in my country of birth,
which doesn't even have a First Amendment. More than
120 book sections of English magazines and newspapers have
requested copies from Irving's British publisher, and
reviews are pouring
in. I might mention Robert Harris, author of
Fatherland and Enigma, who wrote in the
London Evening Standard on April 1 that "in the
words of the military
writer John Keegan: 'No historian of the Second World
War can afford to ignore Irving.' Few contemporary scholars
have his depth of knowledge, virtually none has met as many
of its leading figures and nobody, surely, has unearth more
original material--a private archive known as the 'Irving
Collection,' always generously made available to other
researchers, which weighs more than half a ton."

Harris could have added that his own brilliant book
Selling Hitler--describing the 1983
forgery of "the Hitler Diaries," which hoodwinked a
large chunk of the British establishment (including
historians of the caliber of Hugh Trevor-Roper,
author of The Last Days of Hitler)--was made possible
in part by Irving's finding that those nasty papers were
indeed a fake. Irving rendered another service by unmasking
some spurious documents connecting Churchill and Mussolini.
He speaks faultless German. He has, in the most recent case,
been the first historian to see some 75,000 pages of
diary
entries by Joseph Goebbels, held in secrecy in Moscow
from 1945 to 1992. His studies of the Churchill-Roosevelt
relationship, of the bombing
of Dresden, of the campaigns of Rommel and others, are
such that you can't say you know the subject at all
unless you have read them. And, incidentally, he has never
and not once described the Holocaust as a "hoax."

I have caught David Irving out, just by my own
researches, in one grossly anti-Jewish statement and one
wildly paranoid hypothesis and several flagrant
contradictions. But I learned a lot in the process of doing
so. It's unimportant to me that Irving is my political polar
opposite. If I didn't read my polar opposites, I'd be even
stupider than I am. But what did I get when I went round
that Holocaust seminar? Professors Bauer and Kwiet and
Browning, asked if they agreed with the St. Martin's
decision, shrank as if I had invited them to a Witches'
Sabbath. None of them would say that Irving should never be
published, but all of them said that if it were up to them
he would not be.

Deborah Lipstadt,author
of the standard text Denying the Holocaust, told
The New York Times that one wouldn't and shouldn't
publish David Duke on race relations, and (varying
her pitch a bit) told The Washington Post that one
wouldn't and shouldn't publish Jeffrey Dahmer on
man-boy love. What is this vertiginous nonsense? These are
supposedly experienced historians who claim to have looked
mass death in the face, without flinching. And they can't
take the idea of a debate with David Irving? Quite apart
from the fact that many publishers would have rushed to
promote a Jeffrey Dahmer manuscript, what are we afraid of
here?

I have now read the exchange of correspondence between
Irving and St. Martin's. For a long time, everything was
hunky-dory. The manuscript was read seven times in 15 months
(and understandably, since it contained amazing new
material). The Military Book Club chose it as a main
selection. Sales representatives made ethusiastic noises.
And then, after a few hysterical and old-maidish articles in
the press (Eek--a Nazi!), Irving is told that his
contract is void. He is told this not by the publishers but
by members of the press telephoning him for his
reaction.

I remember when my friend Aryeh Neier, of the
American Civil Liberties Union (whose parents got out of
Berlin just in time), made the decision to uphold the right
of the American Nazi Party to mount a demonstration in
Illinois in 1978. The A.C.L.U. lost a lot of donors and
subscribers that time. In a fine book entitled Defending
My Enemy, Neier explained soothingly that the law on
free expression covers everybody, and thus that in defending
it for anybody you defend it for everybody.

After weeks of general acquiescence on the Irving
suppression, Steve Wasserman of Times Books was moved
to push Neier's point with his colleagues at Random House.
In a contentious meeting, it was agreed they would
actually read the book. Someone will no doubt pick up
where St. Martin's left off; until then, one will have to
seek David Irving on some ghastly Brownshirt Web site, which
will parade its bravery in making the occult facts into
revealed truth. Is this what the established experts
want?

A little depressed at this last thought, I made a
late-night call to Professor Raul Hilberg at the
University of Vermont. Professor Hilberg's book The
Destruction of the European Jews was the original text
on the Holocaust, published in 1961. He is acknowledged as
an ancestor on the matter. He sighed a bit when I mentioned
Irving, whom he regards as a slippery customer but with whom
he has had correspondence about documents and details. A
very good man in footnotes and archives, allowed Hilberg,
but you had to suspect his motives. However:

"If these people want to speak, let them. It
only leads those of us who do research to re-examine what
we might have considered as obvious. And that's useful
for us. I have quoted Eichmann
references that come from a neo-Nazi publishing house. I
am not for taboos and I am not for repression."

Currently, though, there is a
taboo. And who really believes that if it were lifted any
honest person would be the
loser?